Son of the Hero Read online

  I stared at the door, at the bare concrete wall, for several minutes before I worked up the nerve to open the passage again. I took away just my right hand. The portal remained open. When I took the other hand away, the wall returned. I started over, reversing the order. Same result. Opening the way needed both rings on the tracing, but one hand would hold it open.

  “If this is crazy,” I started, but I didn’t know how to finish. I went back to the table and looked through the pack—two changes of clothing (including one of those silly Robin Hood outfits), cigarette lighter and matches (and I don’t smoke), water-purification tablets, aspirin, fishing lines and hooks, six freeze-dried meals (just add water and heat). It looked like an assortment Dad would prepare.

  “Dad, if this is a joke, you’re sure going to hear about it,” I said. An answer would have been comforting, but there was none.

  According to my watch, sunset was about an hour off. I didn’t figure on hopping through that doorway any sooner than that, if then. But I really didn’t want to do my waiting in that screwy room, so I went back upstairs. After a futile search for something decent to eat, I settled on a peanut butter sandwich. The bread was stale but didn’t show any mold. It was passable, since I washed it down with the rest of the beer in my two open bottles. Then I went through the entire house, room by room, looking at all of the doors. The door to Dad’s office had silver tracing. Looking in from the hallway, I put the rings against the silver, but nothing happened. I went into the office and tried from that side. Looking out, the hallway changed. It was still a hall, but the walls were made of large stones. There was a torch burning smokily in a bracket on the other side. The door between the master bedroom and its bath had the silver. Looking into the bathroom and touching the tracing, I saw what seemed to be a closet full of rough brooms and mops. Looking out from the bathroom, I saw a different bedroom with a huge canopied bed, torch brackets on stone walls, and a tatty-looking forest tapestry with unicorns and dragons. Two closet doors were also gimmicked.

  After I finished my look-around, I went to the living room and turned on the TV to try to find something normal. I flipped through the channels—German soccer, American golf, baseball, a newly colorized Errol Flynn movie, a crafts show, news, news, Andy Griffith, Leave It to Beaver. Some things hadn’t changed.

  After twenty-one years of living with my parents, I shouldn’t have been surprised by anything, but those doors in the basement weren’t just against the rules, they weren’t even within the range of cheating. It was as if somebody had added a phony CHANCE card to the Monopoly set. “You have been abducted by aliens from another planet. Go straight to Arcturus III.”

  I turned off the TV. It wasn’t doing the job. “Allen Funt, where are you when I need you?” I asked. Nobody answered. A second peanut butter sandwich didn’t do anything but convince me that beer and peanut butter don’t mix.

  As the day’s light started to fade, I locked the front door and went back to the basement. I put on the fatigues and combat boots, strapped on the belt with my sword, knife, and quiver, slipped on the backpack, and picked up my bow. There was no hat with the outfit, at least none I would wear. Mother had provided only a long green thing with a feather, part of the Robin Hood costume. So I went upstairs for one of my Chicago Cubs caps. That was in my room on the second floor. I looked at myself in the full-length mirror on my closet door.

  “You look like a jackass, Gil Tyner,” I said. I felt like one too.

  “There’s only one thing missing.” I nodded at my reflection. “No, besides your sanity. A gun. If you’re going into trouble, a gun might do more good than the rest of this garbage.”

  Mom didn’t like guns—though she had nothing against swords, spears, battle-axes, halberds, bows, or similar pointed and edged weapons. For Dad, weapons were weapons—tools. He made me practice with all of them. The gun cabinet was in Dad’s office. The cabinet was locked, but I knew the combination to his safe, and the keys to the gun cabinet were kept in there. Two guns were missing from the collection, an HK-91 assault rifle and a Smith & Wesson automatic pistol. Dad’s sword was missing from its pegs on the wall as well.

  “He did expect trouble,” I said. Somewhere along the line, I guess I had decided that it might not all be an elaborate and strange put-on.

  I took the other Smith & Wesson 9mm automatic with the double-column clip, filled two fourteen-shot magazines, stuck one in the gun and the other in a pouch on my belt. I also packed a full box of ammo. The pistol went under my shirt in a clip-on holster. I decided against taking a rifle on practical grounds. I already had enough weight to carry.

  Sunset was gone. I shut off lights on my way to the basement; I grabbed a flashlight from the kitchen cabinet, checked the batteries, and stuck it in my pack. There wasn’t much room left, but I managed to cram in the last four bottles of beer. I thought I might need them before the night was over.

  Down to the basement—nothing had changed there. The green-trout door was still open. I looked through Mom’s note again: “… just follow the path. Bear left at the fork and you’ll come to Parthet’s cottage.” A hint about how far I had to follow the path might have been nice. I shoved the note into my shirt pocket and buttoned it. I left the room light on when I went to the open door with the green trout on it.

  “Time for your grand entrance, fool,” I mumbled. No more hesitating. I slipped my bow over my shoulder, then put my hands up so the rings touched the silver tracing. There was still a little light in the cave beyond, not much. I took a deep breath, and stepped forward …

  2

  Parthet

  … and fell flat on my face in the damp cave.

  I didn’t try to get to my feet right away. That wasn’t because I felt foolish or anything like that—at least, not entirely. One of Dad’s early lessons for me was to not jump right up after a fall but to stay down and take stock first to make sure that I wasn’t badly hurt—unless staying down risked greater injury, as in a fight. I wasn’t hurt, except maybe in the ego. My fall just knocked the air out of me. There was a difference in level between the basement and the cave, or the doorway was placed above the ground in the cave. I hadn’t noticed. Banging my head on the rock floor of the cave didn’t help. It wasn’t the most auspicious start to my rescue mission.

  After a moment the cave stopped spinning and I could breathe again. I became aware of a sore spot on my head and noticed the sound of water dripping nearby.

  Then I heard something else, sort of a soft scraping sound. The first time, it came and went so quickly that it might have been my imagination. But it certainly got my attention.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I mumbled as I stood. I looked around quickly while I dug out my flashlight. My heart seemed to be thumping around a little crazily. It didn’t help at all to see that I was certainly in a cave, not just in some part of the basement I had never known about. I could see a faint light—still off to my left—and guessed that it was coming from the mouth of the cave.

  Then I got the flashlight turned on and discovered that I wasn’t alone in the cave. The flashlight started shaking as if I had a bad case of coffee nerves, like after pulling an all-nighter to get ready for finals. Deeper in the cave—on the side away from the faint glow—maybe twenty feet from me, beyond a small pool of water, there was a lizard staring at me. Some lizard. It was seven feet from nose to tail, two feet high, as close as I could make out under the circumstances—the circumstances being that I was scared a lot worse than I like to admit. A long forked tongue flicked in my direction. The eyes blinked once. It was no Komodo dragon, and I couldn’t think of any other lizards that could be so big.

  I thought it looked hungry, but that might easily have been my imagination.

  For a long moment I stood frozen in place, not daring to move an inch, though that didn’t stop the beam of my flashlight from continuing to wobble all over the place. I wondered how much time I would have to react if the lizard decided to charge. I had both hands
full, bow and flashlight. I couldn’t use the bow one-handed, and I couldn’t do much of anything without the flashlight. I ruled out running for the cave’s exit. First of all, I didn’t know if I would be able to outrun the lizard. Secondly, I wanted to make sure that I could find the doorway back to the basement before I moved too far from where I was. I didn’t know any other route home, and it looked all too certain that I was going to want to find my way back, maybe pretty damn fast.

  Drop the bow, switch the flashlight to the left hand, pull the pistol, and shoot the damn thing, I told myself. Then I realized that I hadn’t jacked a cartridge into the chamber.

  “You’re not scoring points for being prepared,” I told myself as softly as I could.

  The lizard’s tongue kept flicking in and out. It blinked again. I glanced at the wall but didn’t see any trace of the doorway at first, and that pumped another load of adrenaline through my system. When I finally caught a glimpse of badly tarnished silver, I breathed a little easier.

  Pop back through the basement, get the gun ready, and shoot the damn thing from the doorway.

  That sounded like an excellent plan. I could even run upstairs and get more firepower to bolster my courage.

  That’s the ticket, I decided. I counted three in my head and made my move. But the second I started to move, the lizard moved too—in my direction. It didn’t move fast, but I wasn’t waiting to find out for sure if it had “hostile intent.” I threw my bow to the ground, more or less in the direction of the lizard, and started fumbling to get my pistol out and ready.

  I was slow—way too slow. If that lizard had really been determined, I’d have been supper before I got a shell jacked into the chamber. But when my bow clattered on the stone, the lizard turned and scuttled off deeper into the cave. I could hear it moving farther off even after I lost sight of it.

  I looked down at my hands. They were trembling. A deep breath helped, but for a bit all I could do was stand there. That lizard didn’t have any business being there—or anywhere.

  Finally, I realized that I wasn’t accomplishing anything and that the damn lizard might come back. I took another deep breath and then took a long, close look at the wall until I could follow enough of the silver tracing to locate the door mentally. When I touched the silver with my rings, I could see into the basement room, and that reassured me.

  I stepped right through then, just to assure myself that I could. Back in that strange-but-familiar basement room, I took my hand away from the door and breathed deeply, several times. There was a crazy jumble of thoughts bouncing around in my head, and “crazy” was still the operative word. I dearly wanted to dig out the rest of those beers and polish them off … but I remembered why I was in the cave in the first place.

  “You’re going to have to go back through there,” I told myself. I may even have nodded. But after my encounter with that damn lizard, I had to make a quick trip upstairs. Somehow, my bladder managed to avoid letting go when I saw the lizard, but it was clamoring for attention—and it gave me an excuse to put off my return for a few more minutes.

  Then, reluctantly, I stepped back through into the cave and let the doorway close behind me. This time, I had the pistol in my hand, cocked, with the safety off. At least I knew that if I could get back to the cave, I could get home.

  If I could get by the lizard again.

  I picked up my bow and started toward the mouth of the cave, counting my steps going out so I would know how far I had to come in to reach the door tracing.

  Although I didn’t waste a lot of thought on it (I had enough on my mind without that), the cave didn’t look altogether natural. Dad and I had done a little spelunking. There wasn’t much that we hadn’t sampled over the years. Dad was gone so often on his “business trips” that he always wanted to spend a lot of time with me when he was home. For Dad, that meant doing things like hiking, camping, and exploring caves, not just watching ballgames or parades—though we did that too. This cave had been altered. Low spots in the ceiling had been hacked out. The floor was flat and met the walls almost at right angles. Most of the passage was room-high and eight feet wide.

  Twenty paces from the tracing I didn’t need the flashlight any longer. A few steps beyond that, the cave widened into a chamber about twenty feet square. In the center of the chamber, an altar—a large cube of rock with arcane symbols chiseled into its surfaces—had been erected. The cave walls around it were painted with exaggerated nudes, fat-bottomed women with huge breasts, like the fertility goddesses of the ancient Mideast.

  Beyond that chamber, the cave narrowed down again, but the mouth wasn’t far off. The last few steps I had to take hunched over. I stayed inside the mouth of the cave long enough to let my eyes adjust to the outside light. I had had one surprise too many already.

  It seemed to be about mid-afternoon, not thirty minutes past dark—wherever I was. It had to be afternoon (rather than morning) because there had been light visible in the cave when I first looked through the green-trout door. I saw a lot of green outside the cave, even wilder and more disorganized than our backyard. The hillside around me was covered with something like Scottish heather, except for a few large bushes and trees. The cave mouth was some feet above the path. I could see it running off into the forest. The path didn’t come directly to the cave but went around the base of the hill to my right. It was a well-defined track, wide enough for a subcompact car, but rough enough that I’d want four-wheel drive to try it. In the ten minutes that I watched, I didn’t see any traffic.

  “None of this is real,” I told myself. “It can’t be.” There was no tract of land like this anywhere near our house. It wasn’t in our yard, and that cave hadn’t been long enough to get me clear of our subdivision.

  I wasn’t too crazy about continuing, but I also wasn’t quite ready to go back and risk facing that lizard again. Well, I knew what was behind me, and I didn’t know what was in front of me. That may have made the difference. I moved out of the cave, put the safety on my pistol and holstered it, then stretched. The hill rose two hundred feet behind me. I considered climbing to get a better look at the land, but that scratchy heather wasn’t very inviting. It was knee-deep, stiff and prickly. It smelled vaguely like lilacs.

  Mother’s note didn’t say which way to follow the path, just to bear left at the fork. I didn’t see the fork. I assumed—initial hypothesis—that I wanted to head toward the forest. The temperature was comfortable, the breeze perfect. “Nice day for a hike,” I mumbled as I started. Sometimes I can’t help being sarcastic even when I’m my only audience.

  I don’t know what I expected. After the lizard, I don’t think anything would have surprised me. I felt relieved that the forest looked so normal when I got into it. The bottom twenty or thirty feet of the trees were bare trunk, giving it the air of a pillared hall with a thick canopy. Firs, some oaks, other types I didn’t recognize. From the new green, I assumed it was spring there too. Birds sang somewhere. I didn’t recognize the calls, but I only know about half-dozen. A flaw in my education as an outdoorsman. The only birds I’ve ever been interested in watching are beyond singing—usually brown and steaming, on their backs on a platter on the dining-room table … or in one of the Colonel’s boxes or buckets.

  There was a heavy earth smell of recent rain in the air. The path was soft, spongy but not muddy. Part of the time, I moved slowly, observing, checking out the scenery. The rest of the time, I stepped out smartly, trying to cover ground fast since I didn’t know how far I had to go—and I might have to backtrack to try the path in the other direction.

  It was a pleasant place to walk. It gave my nerves a chance to unwind a little, gave me time to start breathing normally. I might almost have been down in the Land Between the Lakes, or any of a dozen other places where Dad and I had gone hiking and camping over the years.

  I had walked about a quarter of a mile before I saw any animal life on the ground in the forest—another one of the damn lizards. It disappeared too qu
ickly for me to be positive, but with the better light, the lizard appeared to have rudimentary wings folded back along its sides. Crazy—there’s that word again, but it’s hard to avoid. I stopped and listened, not nearly as nervous as I had been when I stumbled on the lizard in the cave. I was out in the open and this one was farther off than the first had been. The beast wasn’t very quiet. I drew my pistol again and kept it ready until I was long past where the animal crossed the path. I’ve never liked reptiles.

  The fork in the path was about three-quarters of a mile from the cave. The track to the left was the less well traveled, no more than a footpath. There were thick brambles, knotty vines, along both sides for quite a distance. The trees seemed shorter, meaner. Low branches needed ducking under. Uncle Parker—Parthet—evidently didn’t get a lot of company.

  The farther I went, the more disorganized the forest became. It made me think of a PBS show a long time back that showed the crazy webs spun by spiders on drugs. Smaller, twisted trees forced the path to detour back and forth. The underbrush got thicker, thornier. Stickers reached out to poke me. I was glad I was wearing good fatigues. Those thorns would have shredded the leggings of a Robin Hood costume.

  I almost missed the cottage. It was concealed better than our house, almost invisible among the trees and brambles. The cottage was small (well, cottages are supposed to be small, aren’t they?) and had a thatched roof with new greenery growing out of it. I was surprised that Dad hadn’t tried for that effect at home. It would have been the crowning touch. The two windows I saw had no glass. Warped wooden shutters stuck out and creaked in the light breeze.